It seemed like for much of the ‘90s another tribute compilation came out every damn week, and since huge-deal affairs like If I Were a Carpenter, Red, Hot & Blue, and KISS My Ass hogged the lion’s share of attention, the sheer volume of also-rans consigned the majority of the truly great ones to obscurity. One of those was inarguably among the most interesting—Whore: Various Artists Play Wire, from 1996. Interesting partly because bands that would even want to be on a Wire tribute album are likely to be vastly more interesting than those which wouldn’t, and partly because the label that released it was WMO, which stood for Wire Mail Order. Though it released Wire compilations and Wire members’ solo projects, the members of Wire didn’t run the label; it existed with their blessing, but not their involvement, so this wasn’t an exercise in self-curated narcissism like the above-mentioned KISS tribute. Still, the fact that this could have been construed to have existed under the band’s imprimatur, even if only indirectly, made it a tantalizing disc to dive into.

Interesting also because it contains one of the only two My Bloody Valentine songs released during the lengthy drought that band suffered after Loveless basically changed music. It was their cover of the 154 classic “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W.” Bassist Debbie Googe and drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig had already left the band in 1995, so this cover features only Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher. Still rules, though. And while we’re gazing at shoes, there was a worthy contribution from Lush: the Pink Flag track “Mannequin,” which frankly stomps all over Lush’s better known Wire cover, the version of “Outdoor Miner” on their For Love EP.

Wire’s influence on multiple genres is reflected in the comp’s diversity of artists—New York noise gets a solid nod here via Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo contribution of a reverent rendition of “Fragile” that’s good for multiple spins. Less worthy is Band of Susans’ tepid version of The Ideal Copy’s lead-off single “Ahead.” BoS’ tour with Wire was the first time I saw both bands, and their opening set was much more exciting than their Wire cover here.

Much heavier fare is in the offing as well—Godflesh, the long-running experimental project of Napalm Death’s Justin Broadrick, transform “40 Versions” into an industrial metal dirge, and Fudge Tunnel are a great choice for the already sludgy “Lowdown,” and their lo-fi take on the song hits a really satisfying groove. But not everything hits its mark so well—a favorite band of mine, Bark Psychosis, debase “Three Girl Rhumba” so completely that I kind of wonder why Wire couldn’t have just forgiven Elastica. Ministry/Revolting Cocks singer Chris Connelly goes completely off the map for “A Mutual Friend,” and while his mostly a capella-and-whistling performance is definitely novel and transformative, it’s also, um, not that good.

Yesterday the Facebook page for Band of Susans coughed up some remarkable footage from more than two decades ago. It’s a video lasting an hour and 24 minutes of Band of Susans and My Bloody Valentine playing the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., on June 6, 1989.

It’s scarcely an overstatement to say that before yesterday, next to nobody was even aware that this footage existed. The setlist.fm chronologies for Band of Susans and for MBV (as of today) didn’t list the show at all.

The footage was shot by a fan named Chris Metzler. In the summer of 1989 Band of Susans was supporting their second album Love Agenda, which had come out in April. The well-regarded The Word and the Flesh would come out two years later. For their part, MBV had recently jumped from Lazy Records to Creation Records, having released Isn’t Anything and the “You Made Me Realise” 12-inch in 1988. Their crossover breakthrough of Loveless wouldn’t arrive until 1991.

Shot from the floor by the indefatigable Chris Metzler. Overloaded camera mic. (Distortion IS truth.) There may be a future version of this with better audio and possibly some different camera angles. My Bloody Valentine opened for Band Of Susans about a month later at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. One of our all time favorite shows.

The sound is pretty raw—the vocals in particular are almost never audible in any proper way—but the thrash and clangor of the guitar and drums always rings through quite effectively, and of course you can see them playing quite well. The image of Susan Stenger singing lead vocals while wielding an especially large bass guitar dominates the first half of the video.

As they say, “Distortion IS truth.” We await that “future version ... with better audio” but until then, we’ll be happy with this.

My Bloody Valentine’s lovely, restrained rendition of Hal David and John Barry’s “We Have All The Time in the World” was recorded for Island Records’ Peace Together charity compilation for the youth of Northern Ireland in 1993.

The song, of course, was originally made famous by Louis Armstrong and comes from the soundtrack to the 1969 James Bond movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. The film was the only Bond film to star Australian model George Lazenby as 007.

Considering how notoriously unproductive MBV have proven to be over the years, I wonder if there’s a bit of irony in the group choosing this song, in particular, to record when they did (soon after leaving Creation Records being the context I refer to). Some Internet sources claim that’s actually Kevin Shields singing, but I don’t think so. If it is him, well, he’s channeling Bilinda here quite successfully, I’d say.

But have a lil’ sympathy for this eBay merchant, he’s really been put through the ringer by all the looky-loos…

Sorry folks but I have to say the following: If you don’t know what this is PLEASE research it on your own. I am not taking informational questions. I spent a lot of time explaining to folks what a “sidecar” is.

If you don’t understand what a 32 x 8 x 2 configuration is and that there is no master fader section since it is a SIDECAR,,,, PLEASE don’t ask. This means that you are not a professional and not qualified to buy or use this console. Sorry I don’t mean to be rude but a lot of you just assume that I am here to educate you. I just don’t have the time.

Clearly he doesn’t want just anyone’s money, he only wants the cash from those who know their SIDECAR from a mixing board. If you don’t know, then for the love of God, PLEASE don’t ask, okay?

If you don’t understand that this is a 300 pound configuration and have no experience shipping or picking up expensive electronics PLEASE don’t ask. This is a freight item only ($1500-$1800 within the U.S. and $4800 to the U.K. by a qualified and insured outfit like Rockit Cargo).

You got that? PLEASE don’t ask. If you don’t already know what A FREAKING SIDECAR IS, dude, then you probably wouldn’t want to buy one now, would you?

But just when you’re thinking, “Yeah, so this guy sounds like a bit of a control freak. He might have some unresolved anger management issues, too. And yes, he does seem a lot like a Seinfeld character… but why should I care about this if I don’t even know what a sidecar is myself?”

“Shut up your face, asshole! You don’t even know what a sidecar IS and you’re going to spend $40K on one? PLEASE stop wasting my time!”

It’s because in the very next paragraph of the listing, our hilariously aggressive friend here has decided to publicly call out none other than Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine fame—and a man who surely knows a sidecar from some other studio audio board doo-dad—who he claims weaseled his way out of a previous transaction:

If you intend to buy the console with the buy it now then STICK ME with the freight like a complete jerk moron by the name of (kevin shields from bloody valentine) did last year in England , definitely DO NOT ASK and DO NOT BUY IT NOW without understanding that there is FREIGHT to be added. Tha moron tried to pull a fast one on paypal claiming he expected free shipping. You need to pick this up in person or arrange for freight and pickup on your own.

The seller, a guy named Lee actually leaves his cellphone on this wonderful bit of rock snob comedy gold eBay listing. I feel like calling him and innocently asking what’s a sidecar? And what’s the deal with shipping? Does he pick that up as part of the “buy it now” price? There’s free shipping or what?
Thank you Tyler!

Surely you know by now whether or not My Bloody Valentine’s pivotal Loveless album is in your zone. When it dropped in November of 1991—just as Nevermind was temporarily blurring the line between mainstream and underground—I was in the thick of my college years, and the gauzy, gooey, heavy, trippy Loveless was completely unparalleled as a soundtrack for having sex, getting high as fuck, and having high-as-fuck sex.

Famously, it took band leader Kevin Shields two years to assemble the album’s dense mass of sounds that often defy their guitar origins, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether any given sound or even any sung phrase is as performed or the result of post-production studio manipulation. So when an adventurous fan posted the album backward in its entirety, it was a given that it was going to sound a whole hell of a lot like the album forward. But listening to it backwards subverts the album’s two and a half-ish decades of utter familiarity, and I rather enjoyed hearing it that way.

And I had to wonder if this inspired the idea, but it was posted two weeks after the backwards album was, so it may well be the other way around, if not just coincidence:

(That Twitter feed, by the way, is fun to follow if shoegaze in-jokes are your bag.)

Backward Loveless was posted by NeutralMilkHotelArchive, who describes his/her YouTube channel as “An archive for all Neutral Milk Hotel. Formerly a channel for reversed music,” though it boasts only two NMH shows so far compared to two dozen pieces of reversed music, 7 of which are by Bach. If you’re going to get all high to listen to backward Loveless anyway, it couldn’t hurt to peruse that channel for further fodder, no?

One upside of being “a certain age” is that some of the concerts you went to as a matter of course seem impossibly cool in hindsight, and for me, one of those was My Bloody Valentine on the Loveless tour. I doubt I have to tell anyone who bothered to click on this how amazing the show was, and I almost didn’t go! It was a fairly expensive ticket and I was a flat broke 20-year-old, but a friend with a little flow to spare—in a move that would mark her for sainthood in whatever religion I would be in if I was in one—bought me a ticket, just because she thought it was something I should see. (In kind, I would years later take her to see Kraftwerk in Chicago on her birthday, and I’m not sure that I don’t still owe her.) MBV was exactly everything I wanted in music at the time—a noisy guitar offensive totally outside the dead-to-me hardcore milieu, but otherworldly, pretty, dense, loud, perfect.

A much-discussed feature of their shows at the time—and I understand still, though I haven’t partaken in a reunion show—was the insane noise break (often referred to as “the holocaust”) in the middle of the song “You Made Me Realise.” On the EP of the same title, the song stops cold in the middle and turns into a vortex of white noise. In concert, that sonic hurricane was intensified to painful levels. At peak volume, and with blaring lights aimed at the crowd, MBV stretched that noise break out for 15 caustic, head-melting minutes or longer. Trendy kids who weren’t prepared for such meat-and-potatoes hatenoise (they’d all go on to buy Spooky by Lush and be ultra psyched about it) made for the parking lot with dad’s car keys, but the faithful stuck it out. You couldn’t see anything but those lights. You couldn’t talk to your friends. You just took it. If you were attentive you started to notice all the over- and under-tones and implied rhythms that emerged from the huge, sick, beautiful racket they were making. Nuances asserted themselves in the punitively loud assault of guitar grit and cymbal-wash, and you might have been hallucinating some of them, but that blank wall of sound was rich, complex, and anything but blank. And then, after who even knew how long, without any cue discernable to the audience, on a goddamn dime the band dropped back into the song’s propulsive main riff. It remains to this day one of the most glorious things I’ve ever seen.

The recently released documentary Beautiful Noise by Eric Green and Sarah Ogletree focuses closely on the origins and impact of the scene that MBV galvanized (and amusingly, the press release does a fine job of teasing the film without once ever using the words “shoe” or “gaze”). A recently-released clip from the film features Toni Halliday of Curve, Bobby Gillespie of The Jesus and Mary Chain/Primal Scream, and MBV drummer Colm Ó Cíosóig talking about the “holocaust.” There’s some wonderful rare footage and photography. Billy Corgan also appears. You take the bad with the good.

There’s not a lot of relevant information attached to this live YouTube video of My Bloody Valentine, except for the year, 1987, and a commenter offering that it might have been taped at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town, London. The group was originally formed in Dublin, Ireland in 1983, but the members changed. If the date is to be believed—it seems right to me—then this probably would have been one of the the band’s initial gigs once the classic lineup, consisting of founders Kevin Shields and Colm Ó Cíosóig with Bilinda Butcher and Debbie Googe had been solidified. Bilinda didn’t even join until March of 1987 and until he was fired for being unsuitable after one gig in April, there was a co-lead singer with her named Joe Byfield.

In 1987, My Bloody Valentine weren’t even signed to Creation Records, that happened the following year, in 1988. This would also be the year before the You Made Me Realise EP, so around the time they would have been recording the largely forgotten Strawberry Wine and Ecstasy EPs for Lazy Records.

Although this video suffers from the same fate as most vintage, amateur shot live videos of MBV—even barely past their twee, Byrdsy/indie jangle pop era they were apparently still just too damned LOUD for the audio inputs on 80s video cameras to know what to do with the signal—it’s an interesting curio. There was no “MBV concert” setting on Sony handycams back then, like there is with iPhones today. You’re on your own as far as the set list goes.

Bonus: Approximately eighteen months later, as seen at this gig taped at the University of London Union on February 16, 1989, they were a completely different band. Note extremely short encore of “You Made Me Realise.”

Two nights ago I saw My Bloody Valentine in New York. I had not seen them before, and they more than lived up to expectations. Way back in 1992 I was living in Austria, I was feeling out of touch with music so I asked a friend to send me three discs—my choice of material was almost arbitrary, and yet I was inexplicably certain that all three albums would be at worst really solid. The CDs were Doolittle, Loveless, and Slanted & Enchanted. Yeah. And MBV has been a constant, beloved companion of mine ever since.

Some of the reviews of the MBV shows from earlier this year were surprisinglytepid, but I can assure you that they worked out whatever was holding them back. The unremitting volume of the gig was a constant theme, including the free earplugs distributed at the venue. The show ended with a tibia-rattling rendition of “You Made Me Realise” that for quite a while sounded approximately like Apollo 11 taking off for orbit.

I didn’t time the white noise section, but according to reports it lasted six minutes—BrooklynVegan referred to it as a “Holocaust.” In an intriguing comment in that same BV thread (most of the time BV threads are entertainingly moronic), reader “ME” wrote, “MBV faced a lot of criticism after the previous tour, when the white noise ... lasted for about 20 minutes. Even Colin Newman, who knows a thing or two about making noise from when MBV were still infants, confronted Kevin, telling him it was irresponsible to inflict such a damage on their fans. Maybe that is why they cut it short now?”

Curiosity piqued, I decided to hit the Google machine. There does indeed seem to have been such an incident. In a 2008 interview with exclaim.ca, Newman tells the following story:

Last night, before we went home, my wife and I were at the after party and I had to use the loo. And Kevin [Shields] was in there. There were three stalls and I was on one side and Kevin was on the far side and there was another guy, who was at the after party, but he looked like he was just a fan. Kevin said to me, “What do you think?” and I just said that it just “hurt my ears” and that the last song “went on too long.” He said, “Yeah, we’re going to have to do some work on that, it was something that we were just kicking around.” And the guy in the middle said, “I can’t believe you just said that! It was such a religious experience for me!” But to me it was just my friend being too loud.

It all reminded me of MBV’s cover of the Wire classic “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W,” which appeared on the 1996 album Whore: Tribute to Wire. By the way, did you know that 41°N 93°W correlates to a town called Centerville, Iowa? I didn’t even know it was about America. Here’s a gratuitous picture of Centerville:

My Bloody Valentine, “Map Ref. 41°N 93°W”:

Below, the little-known orginal music video for “You Made Me Realise” from 1989:

According to a story published by The Guardian today, the rise of “Cool Britannia” in the mid-1990s, when Blur and Oasis were among the world’s most talked-about bands, was deliberately engineered by the British intelligence agency MI5, according to My Bloody Valentine resident genius Kevin Shields. “Britpop was massively pushed by the government,” Shields said. “Someday it would be interesting to read all the MI5 files on Britpop. The wool was pulled right over everyone’s eyes there.”

It’s unclear whether this was intended as a partisan move—virtually all of Great Britain’s pop luminaries have supported Labour for years, after all. The Prime Minister was a Tory through the entire 1990s up until Tony Blair’s election in 1997—but Blur and Oasis had already achieved worldwide fame (and released their best albums) by that time. The support of people like Noel Gallagher and Damon Albarn for Blair is somewhat predictable—the same sort of thing happened in the United States when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, and George Bush was running the executive branch so you can be damn sure the CIA wasn’t funding them. The thesis would run, I suppose, that the elevation of Britpop was intended to bolster Great Britain’s cultural prestige in general. On the other hand, it’s always a possibility that Shields is looking to explain the odd happenstance that the rousing, anthemic Beatles-influenced rock of Oasis widely outsold his own band’s brilliant, multi-layered, dreamy, feedback-heavy shoegazer fuzz rock.

Over the years, especially during the Cold War, governments have pushed certain artists to reinforce their own legitimacy. Prominent examples include the ballet, complete with machine guns, of the Mao era in the People’s Republic of China, the massive censorship of non-regime-approved artists in the Soviet bloc, and the U.S. government’s creation of The Paris Review (as detailed here) and the intellectual magazines Der Monat in Germany, Preuves in France, and Encounter in the U.K., all of which, despite the firm assumption of intellectual independence, received lavish funding from the CIA.

Well, whatever. Shields may or may not be on to something here, but his musical work remains some of the most powerful and resonant rock music ever produced. Here’s Loveless if you haven’t listened to it lately:

Well, according to Kevin Shields, who would probably know, that’s apparently the case. Shields made the comment to a heckler at a Sunday night gig in London (see video) after they played a new number, named as “Rough Song” on the setlist (which was photographed and sent around on Twitter).

“Two or three days?” That’s tomorrow. It’s only been what, 22 years since the last album? (A new MBV album was promised last year, too, so don’t hold your breath.)

The group’s warm-up gig in London was in preparation for their upcoming appearances around the UK, Japan, Australia, Primavera Sound and the Coachella festival on these shores.

My Bloody Valentine’s lovely, restrained cover of Hal David and John Barry’s “We Have All The Time in the World” was recorded for Island Records’ Peace Together charity compilation for the youth of Northern Ireland, in 1993.

The song, of course, was originally made famous by Louis Armstrong and comes from the soundtrack to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Considering how notoriously unproductive MBV have proven to be over the years, I wonder if there’s a bit of irony in the group choosing this song in particular to record. Some Internet sources claim that’s actually Kevin Shields singing, but I don’t think so. If it is him, well, he’s channeling Bilinda here quite successfully.

They will release their 2 full-length studio albums, Isn’t Anything and Loveless, plus EP’s 1988-1991, a brand new compilation which draws together their 4 EP releases, Feed Me With Your Kiss, You Made Me Realise, Glider and Tremolo alongside 7 additional rare and previously un-released tracks.

The original studio albums have been painstakingly re-mastered by Kevin Shields at Metropolis Studios in London and Loveless comes as a 2-disc set featuring a previous re-mastering from original analogue tapes, completed by Kevin Shields but never released. Alongside their EPs, the compilation album features a mixture of rare and unavailable and previously unreleased tracks.

Upside Down: The Creation Records Story is a roller coaster of film, which tells the incredible tale of one of the most important independent record labels of the past fifty years - Creation Records.

This excellent film reveals how the gallus Glaswegian Alan McGee started the label with a £1,000 bank loan in the 1980s, and went on shape music in the 1980s and 1990s, as he made Creation home to such talents as The Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, Medicine, The Pastels, Teenage Fanclub, BMX Bandits, Super Furry Animals, The Boo Radleys, Saint Etienne, Momus, My Bloody Valentine, 3 Colours Red and Oasis - who were signed for £40,000.

McGee originally thought Liam Gallagher was the band’s drug dealer, as he told the Sun:

“I was up in Glasgow seeing my dad and I wasn’t sure I’d even go to the gig. I got there early by mistake. Oasis were on first, before most people arrived. There was this amazing young version of Paul Weller sat there in a light blue Adidas tracksuit. I assumed he was the drug dealer and that Bonehead, the guitarist, was the singer.

“It was only when they went on stage I realised it was the lead singer Liam Gallagher. I knew I had to sign them.

“Noel and I talked after the show and just said ‘done’ and he turned out to be a man of his word.

“I was lucky to be there. We didn’t send out scouts. Most of my signings were because I happened to see new bands. That couldn’t happen any more. If a new band as much as farts it’s all over the internet.”